Today, of course, is the 38th day of Cunegonde...
I think the night I heard "High School Madness" changed the course of my life. I was probably in 8th or 9th grade and on Sunday nights, while in bed, I'd listen to a late night comedy show on the radio. It was an hour of mixed material that flowed from one piece to the next with no breaks for chatting or commercials. One fateful night -- in among the George Carlin, Cheech and Chong, Monty Python, Lily Tomlin and Bill Cosby -- I heard an amazing 7 minutes of surreal comedy. It was a "movie" with Archie and Jughead type characters except that Riverdale was a military high school in a war zone. The jokes, innuendo, references and satire came at a speed that made my head hurt. I could barely remember what had gone on between the density of the material and my laughing. The next day, on the way to school, I tried to re-live the experience for my friend Chip. Somehow, he knew I was talking about Firesign Theatre.
I'd heard of them of course - their albums were pretty popular in the early 1970s and you couldn't help by notice their eye-catching covers when you went into a record store. The one that had always caught my attention was How Can You Be In Two Places At Once When You're Not Anywhere At All?, with it's cover image of Groucho and John under the banner "All Hail Marx and Lennon". I guess I'd always assumed they were some kind of druggy/political/hippy comedy group that were going to be too weird for me. But I sussed out the skit I'd heard as "High School Madness!", the end of Side One of Don't Crush That Dwarf, Hand Me The Pliers and bought a copy the next chance I had.
I had been right on one count: the stuff was definitely weird when measured against the comedy I was familiar with. It was sort of like Monty Python but faster paced, without the over-arcing silliness and non-sequiturs, and full of verbal wordplay and puns (ranging from groaners to so-clever-they-sail-past) that required multiple listens to begin to appreciate. Firesign satirized everyone and everything with equal relish -- TV, news media, politics (liberal and conservative), the military, pacifists, religion, aliens, hippies, drugs, the government. Dwarf was sequenced like a person switching channels on late night TV, what we would now call channel surfing though at that time there weren't many TV remotes and nothing beyond the 13 VHF and a couple of UHF channels in most homes. As the material progresses, the viewed world starts interacting with the viewer, a man named George Tirebiter. And of course, the meta-situation is that the audience is viewing a viewer. Strange, surreal, subversive and 15 years ahead of its time.
The Firesign Theatre was composed of four men living in LA: Phil Proctor, David Ossman, Philip Austin, and Peter Bergman. Bergman had a radio show called Radio Free Oz and eventually the other three came to be a part of it. Proctor and Bergman were Yale-trained drama grads (actor and playwright), Austin was an actor and Ossman was a radio producer. Together they assaulted the late night radio waves with anarchic improvisational comedy that included satire so close to the bone that the audiences weren't always sure if it was a put on or something real. In 1967 CBS signed them to do a record album and Firesign Theatre was born (the name of the group comes from the fact that all four have astrological signs that are fire signs.) Over the next eight years they would produce a body of recorded comedy unlike anything anyone has done since.
Waiting For The Electrician Or Someone Like Him (1968). Their first album is actually four longish sketches: the first deals largely with the exploitation of the Native Americans by the US government, the second and third riff on the irony of counterculture, and the last is a weird surreal fantasia that offers a preview of what will make them brilliant in another couple of albums. ELECTRICIAN containS one of their most famous sketches, "Beat The Reaper", a game show where contestants are infected with a dangerous disease and play to get the antidote.
How Can You Be In Two Places At Once When You're Not Anywhere At All? (1969). Side two of the album (or track two of the CD) contains their most famous sketch "The Further Adventures of Nick Danger", a stream of consciousness 1940s radio detective type story. This is where the group starts coming into its own meta, self-referential universe -- the characters comment on the process of making the album and the audience hears half of a phone conversation they'll hear the rest of on the next album. Speaking of stream of consciousness, side one ends with an homage (or parody, depending on how you look at it) to James Joyce's ULYSSES. Smart writing that continues to reveal nuances with every listen.
Don't Crush That Dwarf, Hand Me The Pliers (1970). As mentioned above, this is a masterpiece. One long sketch over two sides of an album, the basic story involves a former child actor channel surfing through different stations that all happen to be showing things connected to his life. Given the fact that Proctor and Bergman were drama students, one has to suppose this was influenced by Samuel Beckett's play KRAPPS LAST TAPE (and as a side note, I teach these two pieces simultaneously when I do my radio drama course). The "High School Madness" skit still cracks me up after 35 years.
I Think We're All Bozos On This Bus (1971). This is a sort of continuation of DWARF in the sense that it starts where that album ends and is a continuous story spread over both sides. This is a very surreal and weird trip and for many fans this is the favorite release. Listening to it again I'm struck by the hacking, holograms and computer aspects of the story, which seem very very forward thinking for 1971. This album bookends their first great period of material.
Dear Friends (1971). This is actually a distillation of six months of live radio shows called Dear Friends. There were 21 episodes originally and they are FINALLY available in a soon-to-be-released collection of all their live radio broadcasts from the early 1970s. But this is a good if slightly disjointed collection of material - even though the bits are loosely by topic ("A Properly Religious Opening", "The T.V. Set", "Animals Vegetables and Minerals" and "It Sure Is Realistic!") it lacks the cohesion of the regular albums and thus is not one of their greatest. If anyone ever runs across the reel-to-reel version of this, let me know....
Not Insane or Anything You Want To (1972). Some of this comes from a live radio show but it's not their best work. It has the first version of their fake Shakespeare play Anything You Want To but even that can't bring this up to their high standards. I haven't heard this in years - it's the only one I only have on vinyl so maybe it is worth a revisit.
The Tale Of The Giant Rat Of Sumatra (1974). Sherlock Holmes given the Firesign treatment. Somewhat of a return to form after a low-yield holding pattern, although like Nick Danger, the use of a single genre seems to restrict the insanity that makes them great. But this has the most puns per square minute of talking in any of their releases. And it sets the stage for....
Everything You Know Is Wrong (1974). For my money this is their other masterpiece: a tour-de-force lampooning pseudoscience, alien invasions, government conspiracies. Now, I gotta wonder, as I watch Buffy The Vampire Slayer, whether the idea of the Sunnydale Hellmouth came from the town in this album. I sure hope so. Anyway, this album is the X-Files twenty years prior to that. Scary how current this still sounds. My favorite concept - "Men and Women are actually the same sex".
In The Next World You're On Your Own (1975). This one is sort of all over the place, from cop show to the Oscars , but weirdly it works really well as it roams through 1970s media. This is their last really good release. After this they never got it together as well and by 1980 they pretty much dissolved. There's new stuff that been coming out in the last decade but it just doesn't measure up.
Shoes For Industry! : The Best Of Firesign Theater (1993). A double-disc collection for their 25th anniversary. Contains a good sampling of material from 1967-1975 if you're looking for a place to start.
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